Two of the world's biggest video game franchises - Call Of Duty and Mario Kart - are poised to roll out mobile phone and tablet editions. Industry titans Activision and Nintendo are both weeks away from launching app versions of their games which have racked up combined estimated sales of 350million copies on console. Both Mario Kart Tour and Call Of Duty: Mobile will be available on Google's Android and Apple's iOS from September 25 and October 1 respectively. Activision has confirmed that maps, characters and weapons which first-person shooter fans enjoyed on Xbox, Playstation and PC would be featured on the all-new Call Of Duty: Mobile. Company vice president Chris Plummer said: 'We are delivering the definitive first-person action experience on mobile with signature Call Of Duty gameplay in the palms of your hands.' 'We are bringing together some of the best the franchise has to offer, including Modern Warfare maps like Crash and Crossfire, Black Ops maps like Nuketown and Hijacked, and many more, into one epic title.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe may be fun to play on the Nintendo Switch, but this takes racing to the next level. Seth Bling is a programmer who has an affinity for Mario games as well as artificial intelligence. So, he decided to combine these two to create MariFlow, a neural network that has been designed to play Super Mario Kart. To train the AI, it was shown 15 hours of video of his father's play style, and at the end, it managed to to win gold in the 50cc Mushroom Cup. When the network got into tricky situations, Seth took over the controls to help teach the AI on how they should be tackled.

As gamers who picked up the SNES Classic Edition can attest, Super Mario Kart is still a masterpiece 25 years after its release. Later games in the series have refined the gameplay and graphics, but the original version can still present a challenge for anyone who attempts to master it…even when the challenger is a machine. As you can see in the video below, one man has attempted to train a neural network to play Super Mario Kart. However, the network, known as "MariFlow," is still somewhat limited in what it can accomplish within the game. Via Polygon, YouTube user SethBling posted a video about MariFlow, the recurrent neural network he used to play Super Mario Kart.

The success of last year's NES Classic Edition clearly took Nintendo by surprise. The company was completely incapable of meeting demand, leaving many people unable to buy what became the must-have gift of the holiday season. Now Nintendo has given its SNES the Classic Edition treatment and promises it's going to build way more than it did last year. Having grown up with the SNES (OK, we had a Sega Genesis and my best friend had SNES), it's easy to assume that everyone knows what it is and why people are so excited that it's back. After dominating the 8-bit era with the NES, Nintendo came late to the party with its sequel. The SNES launched in '90 in Japan, '91 in the US and '92 in the UK. The Genesis had a two-year head start in almost every country, but Nintendo's second-generation home console was worth the wait.

AI and machine learning have been in development for quite some time, but MarI/O aims to bring them to video games. YouTube user "Seth Bling" first tried it on Super Mario World, and now, it's been reprogrammed from Super Mario Kart. Like the previous experiment, MarI/O wasn't taught anything beforehand, and only a few simple parameters were set. The AI uses a "fitness level" to determine what buttons to press and so forth, literally being incentivized to continue doing so. After many attempts, it finally managed to beat the computer, using several dirt paths to increase efficiency.